There is a general need for mapping healthcare data, especially healthcare provider information, such as demographics, license, education, and billing information, to enable the populating of administrative forms. Healthcare providers (also referred to as doctors or practitioners) are often required to fill out hundreds of various forms that are exchanged with other providers and healthcare entities to maintain their practice as well to maintain insurance and hospital affiliations. For example, a specialist applying for credentialing may need to complete a form for one healthcare entity that contains the same core information he or she just filled in a different form used to apply for enrollment and contracting for another healthcare entity.
One common method of auto-completing or pre-populating forms is one-to-one mapping of database fields to form fields, via manual coding. Such mapping generally requires re-mapping, at a programming level, of each relationship as new forms are added to the system. As the result, the process may take weeks to map one form and does not provide reasonable scalability to deal with the vast amount different forms in the healthcare industry.
Another method for pre-populating forms includes extracting data from a database into a separate flat file. An offline form mapping tool is then utilized to map form fields with flat file data fields to eventually populate the form with extracted data. This process is also cumbersome and time consuming due to lack of automation and reusability.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for automating the mapping and completion of different forms that is more efficient and more scalable than existing methodologies.